Year of the Dragon (1985)

August 16, 1985

FILM: 'YEAR OF DRAGON,' CIMINO IN CHINATOWN

By JANET MASLIN

Published: August 16, 1985

MICHAEL CIMINO has a distinctive way of making things look and sound, but he could never be accused of having a style. If style is a director's way of shaping and intensifying his audience's perceptions, then what Mr. Cimino has amounts to its very antithesis. In ''Year of the Dragon,'' a busy and elaborate film that manages to be inordinately messy, his tactics are a constant distraction, dissipating the viewer's interest at every turn. That, even more than excess, was the fundamental problem with ''Heaven's Gate,'' and it is still every bit as egregious. It is no pleasure to report that Mr. Cimino's reputation as the man who best exemplifies what can go wrong with big-ego, big-budget film making remains unchallenged.

''Year of the Dragon,'' which opens today at Loews Astor Plaza and other theaters, is considerably shorter than ''Heaven's Gate,'' and it is violent enough to have more momentum. These are the improvements, and they stand alone. Otherwise, ''Year of the Dragon'' gives the impression that some other crowded, ornate film about New York's Chinatown has been tossed into the air and shattered, only to have its pieces rearranged in a completely illogical way. The hair of the leading man, Mickey Rourke, changes color from scene to scene. The leading lady begins one sequence by stepping out of the shower to answer her apartment door without turning the water off, and has a lengthy conversation with her visitor, during which the water somehow stops running.

Mr. Rourke, as a police captain who is a Vietnam veteran, sometimes speaks of the Chinese and the Vietnamese as though they were interchangeable. Mr. Cimino's idea of embroidering the captain's character is to decorate his bedroom with a crucifix and a statue of John Wayne.

''Year of the Dragon,'' based on a much more fast-paced and informative novel by Robert Daley, tells what happens when this captain is assigned to Chinatown and charged with controlling the violence of the youth gangs there. He finds that his adversary is a handsome young businessman (played by John Lone, who had the title role in ''Iceman'') who also doubles as an underworld kingpin.

Though Mr. Cimino shepherds the whole movie toward a closing confrontation between these rivals, he typically deflates the ending by sapping the impact of their earlier encounters. They never seem to meet alone, since most of their talks take place in settings that are either overpopulated or full of attention-getting props. The conversations they do have are interrupted by constant and maladroit editing; indeed, the editing is so partial to uninteresting background detail and irrelevant reaction shots that it is the film's single worst feature. At times, Mr. Cimino further heightens his tendency to lose the actors in a larger tapestry by shooting them with a wide-angle lens.

As for the larger tapestry here, Chinatown was built in North Carolina for the film, and it has been recreated down to the last noodle. Production notes explain that close attention was paid to such details as the grading of street surfaces and the installation of pipes to vent steam from the manhole covers. However, the effect is that of a colossal blur, since Mr. Cimino has so little facility for focusing the attention on anything in particular. Even worse, all this meticulousness becomes crushingly literal. Without any gift for simplicity or shorthand, the director must spell out absolutely everything. To show that someone is a general, he must - and does, in one particularly overscaled sequence here - surround him with an entire army.

The actors fare particularly badly under such circumstances. Mr. Rourke, who almost always generates a relaxed, knowing magnetism, is entirely lost in the underwritten role of a middle-aged policeman. He must also grapple with the flat-footed, heavily scatological dialogue that seems just as out of place here as it did in ''Heaven's Gate.'' (The screenplay is by the director and Oliver Stone.) Mr. Rourke is never able to give much conviction to the lines that have him frequently comparing Chinatown's gangland troubles to the Vietnam War; this, like the motif of gang rape here and in ''Heaven's Gate,'' appears to have more to do with some larger vision of Mr. Cimino's than with the story at hand.

Still, Mr. Rourke manages to be more ingratiating and interesting than Ariane, the model who plays an upscale young newscaster with whom he has an affair. She is so ineffectual a part of the film's framework that she is even upstaged, in a nude scene, by a glimpse of the Brooklyn Bridge.

''Year of the Dragon'' is so lacking in feeling, reason and narrative continuity that it furthers the impression left by ''Heaven's Gate,'' and even by much of ''The Deer Hunter,'' that Mr. Cimino's insistence on working on a vast and extravagant scale is not matched by an ability to work articulately on any other. Inscrutable Blur YEAR OF THE DRAGON, directed by Michael Cimino; screenplay by Oliver Stone and Mr. Cimino, based on the novel by Robert Daley; photographed by Alex Thomson; edited by Francoise Bonnot; music by David Mansfield; produced by Dino De Laurentiis; released by MGM/ UA Entertainment Company. At Loews Astor Plaza, 44th Street west of Broadway; Loews Orpheum, Third Avenue at 86th Street; Loews 34th Street Showplace, 238 East 34th Street, and other theaters. Running time: 126 minutes. This film is rated R. Stanley WhiteMickey Rourke Joey TaiJohn Lone Tracy TzuAriane Angelo RizzoLeonard Termo Louis BukowskiRay Barry Connie WhiteCaroline Kava William McKennaEddie Jones Ronnie ChangJoey Chin Harry YungVictor Wong Milton BinK. Dock Yip Fred HungPao Han Lin